


Umbrella Effects in Conservation

by Guede



Series: Sustainable Management [14]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Hale Fire, Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Chris Feels, Dom/sub Undertones, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Good Parent Melissa, M/M, Melissa & Peter Are Bros, Multi, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 02:29:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6781738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Regrouping after the cursed motel adventure takes longer than expected.  Mostly because Melissa’s concentrating on her son, but as it turns out, he’s no longer her biggest worry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Umbrella Effects in Conservation

“It’s…it’s going,” Melissa finally says, mostly to her coffee. “It’s been very quiet around the house. You know.”

She sounds like a robot, she thinks with a grimace, or like one of those Stepford Moms who show up to the PTA meetings and blithely wave off all the hard work that everybody knows is being handled by a team of nannies and housekeepers anyway. Melissa grimaces again and sneaks a peek over, even though she knows she’s not going to get any judgmental comments, or even a shady look, from her current company.

No, Chris just looks thoughtfully at the hospital parking lot under the breakroom balcony, sipping from his own cup. “Allison’s still staying home too,” he says, with a twist of the mouth and an odd, uncomfortable hitch of one shoulder. “She’s not upset at _me_ , so far as I can tell, but…I don’t know.”

“She’s not doing it out of sympathy with Scott, is she?” Melissa asks.

Chris’ brow jumps, and then he glances over. “Like a solidarity strike? I don’t know, usually when she thinks he’s getting a raw deal, she sneaks out and breaks curfew. She’s actually doing everything I ask her to do and she seems pretty cheerful about it. And—and I hate to say this, but _that’s_ what’s making me suspicious.”

“Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself. If it’s one thing I’ve learned, not just from being Scott’s mom, but being a nurse, it’s that teenagers are the most contrary, difficult to understand creatures on the face of the earth,” Melissa mutters, tucking her arm into the crook of Chris’ arm. She leans into him for a second too, resting her head against his shoulder, and feels him relax. “Just when you think you have them all figured out, they go and change on you.”

He laughs a little, then dips his head towards his cup again. “Well, you’re probably more of an authority than me. I guess it’s just…if I didn’t know better, I’d say she was trying to punish him, too.”

Melissa frowns at her coffee, then lifts her head off Chris’ shoulder. She’s going to ask just what he means by that and then she catches herself. Not because she doesn’t want to know—much as she likes Allison, Scott is her son and her kneejerk instinct is always going to be to side with him—but she doesn’t want to end up guilt-tripping Chris about his parenting with a careless comment. The more she gets to know him, the more she realizes how much he remembers and obsesses over each and every one of those, to the point that it trips him up with Allison more than anything else. He just gets so stuck in trying to figure out the perfect way to deal with his daughter that he doesn’t actually deal with her.

“I don’t mean—that came out wrong,” Chris mutters almost immediately, with a slightly nervous look at her. He breathes out a bit roughly when she rubs his arm, then ducks back into his coffee. “She misses him for sure, and her feelings haven’t changed or anything. It’s just…”

“She’s mad at him, and since I grounded him, they haven’t had a chance to work out their fight,” Melissa says. “Though that’s never stopped them from finding ways to talk before.”

“Yeah, that’s what I mean about it being weird.” Chris lowers the cup and wipes his mouth off with the back of his hand, then looks at Melissa again. “I…almost want to say it’s got something to do with you. Something she said—I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too much into it. But—”

“Like she doesn’t want to upset me?” Melissa says, blinking. She hums tunelessly, thinking it over, and then giggles. “God, Chris, you know, I think at this point I just expect them to keep talking to each other. I don’t even think about Allison anymore when I tell Scott no hanging out with friends except for schoolwork.”

Chris smiles at her, but he’s a little absentminded about it, still chewing over Allison’s behavior. “Well, if that’s why, better late than never…but it’s not just because she doesn’t want to upset you. It’s like…she’s been digging more into the whole packborn part of our background, and some of the group training, and at first I thought she was—was worried, maybe, about what I’d passed down, but…I think she might be…following your lead, so to speak?”

Melissa blinks again, looking at him. A flicker of nerves goes through Chris’ eyes and she puts her chin back on his shoulder, then slides her hand up his arm to rest against his nape; John started that, deliberately playing around with his alpha vibes and Chris’ instincts, but it does seem to ground Chris and so Melissa’s been trying it out too.

“Huh,” she finally says. She tilts her head so that she can look at the clock on the wall behind them, then snorts and presses her cheek against his arm. “Well, I’m flattered. Though honestly, I don’t know that she wants to be taking my example all the time.”

“You do fine with Scott, why not?” Chris says. Genuinely surprised that she’d doubt herself, lovely man that he is.

She smiles at him, and then she hides her sigh in his shoulder. “I do fine—I think I do fine, and then something like this happens and I just wonder, Chris. He’s usually so…thoughtful, and careful, and he’s being like that right now. He’s being _so_ good about being grounded. Didn’t fuss about it, apologized—and apologized for the right things. And he does all the chores since he’s home, and the house hasn’t been this clean in months, and I just look at him and I think, do I really need to ground him for the full two weeks? I just don’t know if I’m being too strict or too much of a pushover.”

“Well, I don’t think anybody’s going to say you’re being too strict,” Chris says. He pauses, fiddling with his cup, and then twists slightly to toss that into the trashcan. “I’m probably not a good comparison, but John said if it’d been Stiles…”

“John and Stiles aren’t the best comparison either, if only because Stiles gets to invoke ecological crisis to get out of trouble…” Then she looks up and catches his wince. “Oh, I didn’t mean…I’m rambling. I just…wonder, once in a while, if I give Scott what he needs as a werewolf. I don’t regret going packless, but it’s one thing when you’re an omega or a packborn, and another when you’re just…somebody who got lucky with their kid.”

Chris listens to her, attentive and serious. He’s not so intent that it’s unnerving, or that it makes her think he’s just humoring her. He just considers what she says, and then replies in a measured, not at all flippant tone. “I think the fact that he’s obeying you right now says you’ve been as much of an alpha as he needs. And that he isn’t hating you for it says something about what kind of mother you are.”

He only really slips up at the very end, and even then, it’s a small inhale, the crack in his calm showing that he’s nervous again, worrying about whether she might be offended. Melissa looks up at him, wondering something else—how on earth she ever thought he was a self-centered asshole—and then she smiles. Tugs him forward by the nape and kisses him on the mouth.

“You’re sweet,” she says.

“Thanks.” He rocks a little against her grip, just parting their lips, and then tilts his head for a longer, slightly less workplace-appropriate kiss. “Though I mean it.”

“I know, I know, and I think it was good for me to hear it,” Melissa tells him. She angles her head to kiss him beside the mouth this time, and then reluctantly withdraws as her phone buzzes. Still technically a couple minutes of break left, but they’re going to be cutting it close. “Well, I have to get back, and then I guess I’ll go home and see my obedient son and think about whether that makes up for the scare he gave me. Are you going to be over later?”

Chris stiffens a little, then makes an awkward duck of his head, trying to signal no without shaking off her hand. And then Melissa remembers, and feels like a self-centered asshole herself.

“God, I’m sorry, right, you’re meeting with that FBI team over the motel,” she says, rubbing at his nape. Then she cocks her head and looks at him again. She heard about that from John and hasn’t had time to talk to either man about it; she’d meant to spend this break on it, but had gotten side-tracked about their kids. “Well, how late is that running?”

He frowns at her. “You won’t be off till close to midnight yourself.”

“I know, but you know how long it takes me to wind down, and Scott’s even turning in early these days so he can get up in the morning and pack my lunch,” Melissa says. “I’ll be up if you want company.”

“You just want an excuse to get pie,” Chris says, eyeing her.

Melissa doesn’t deny it. Anyway, pie wouldn’t be a bad thing after a rough week, and…John had said Chris had volunteered to fill in the FBI people, but he’d been muttering about damn idiots who can’t cross-check their own files about the previous Argent involvement and Melissa had gotten the strong impression he thought there was some pressure going on. Not that Chris even needs that, what with his guilt over his family’s mistakes. He probably would have volunteered to clean out the place all by himself if federal standards didn’t mandate two independent exorcisms.

But, she thinks reluctantly, now isn’t the time or place to tackle that one. “I’m just letting you know,” she says, doing her best to keep it light. She strokes her hand along his neck a last time, letting her fingers drift into his hairline before removing them, and he does get a little bit of an appreciative glint in his eyes. “If you’re cranky, and tired, and want to bitch about the FBI, I’ve got a lot of experience with all of those things.”

“Well, I’ll keep that in mind,” Chris says. His tone is dry but the glint in his eye softens to that hesitant affection that always makes her wish they could just sneak out and go curl up somewhere. “If I’m that late, I’ll text you, save you the drive home.”

“Sweet,” she says again, and then she sends him off with a peck on the cheek.

* * *

It’s a rare quiet night at the hospital and Melissa’s already seen Chris, so she’s fully expecting to settle behind her station and catch up on paperwork when a coworker lets her know that John’s looking for her. “Before you grab anything, it’s not an emergency,” John says, walking in a couple minutes later.

Melissa shows him the handful of spare tranqs in her hand, then makes a point of putting them away. John makes a face at her, and then slips a small Styrofoam container across the counter.

She doesn’t open it, but she pries apart the side just enough to glimpse the contents. “It’s not an emergency but you’re bringing me bribe pie?”

“Yeah, well…I don’t see why you have to wait till the town’s burning down to have a little something,” John says, but he’s glancing around. Casually, clocking the nurse down the hall and the doctors chatting softly in a nearby room. “You’re not on break?”

“No, I am, but…” Melissa glances at the paperwork—she doesn’t get any help from the Service with hospital forms, unfortunately—then pushes back from her desk and walks with John out to the parking lot.

They settle into his car and he catches himself from checking his phone, and then gives her a half-exasperated, half-sympathetic look. “Sorry about this. I should’ve texted ahead, but I only just—”

“Spit it out already, John, you’ve got me thinking somebody died,” Melissa snaps.

She immediately winces, but John just looks embarrassed, slouching a little in his seat. “Yeah, sorry, just…wanted to let you know that the FBI, they’re going to stop over here for a few days.”

“I know, Chris was by earlier,” Melissa says. Then she frowns, rerunning John’s words. “Wait, a few days? Why do they need to be here that long? Is Chris—”

“No, no, he’s not in trouble. And he’s not getting dragged into…well, not more than he’s asking for, which…that’s up to him.” John presses his lips together for a second, then gives his head a sharp shake. “Anyway, it’s not about him. It’s just that they’re going to want to come by the hospital at some point. They’re checking into all the deaths at the motel now, trying to find out exactly when the suspicious ones started, and turns out a lot of the early ones landed here.”

“Well, that makes sense. Beacon Hills has one of the oldest hospitals in the area,” Melissa says slowly. She’s still watching John, especially how he’s not quite looking at her, while doing his damnedest to keep an eye on her. He’s obviously worried she’s going to take the news badly, but so far she’s not seeing how any of this is even news, to be honest. “So did they want me to—”

“No, no, they can work with the morgue and the records department themselves.” John snorts and starts fidgeting with his phone. “If they can’t even do that on their own, I don’t even know how they’re going to handle an exorcism. I just figured I’d give you a heads-up.”

Oh. Melissa nods absently and opens up the Styrofoam to check her pie, and then sighs. “You know Scott and I don’t have any problems with the FBI, John. Just with one agent of theirs, who somehow _still_ is posting good enough numbers to be worth—well, that’s a can of worms I swore I’d stop letting mess me up. Anyway, I know he’s not on this team, so why are you so jumpy?”

“Yeah, no, I’m not saying you’re sensitive,” John says, just quickly enough for her to know he knows he’s edging into dangerous territory. “Never seen you be anything less than professional. It’s just—look, so we’ve got that empty posting, and last time I was in D.C., Marcella was saying we should look at hunter alternatives, and…and anyway, the team leader, he heard about it and he’s got a candidate and we’re supposed to talk about them, too.”

“Oh, well…all right,” Melissa says, frowning at him. She’s still not sure where this is going, but she’s starting to get an inkling from how John’s fidgeting is going up. He and his son are so much alike sometimes, and she’s long since learned that the more Stiles moves his hands, the more he’s flustered about something internal. “So is this some kind of interagency favor? I didn’t think we owed them…and anyway, don’t they owe us big for the motel? Because I and poor Ranger Graeme had the whole scene secured, and—”

“No, no, the guy actually wanted to thank you for the great job you did,” John says. His fingers go still on his phone and then he looks directly at her. “And, well, the referral’s…trying to return the favor, actually. As far as I can tell.”

“Okay,” Melissa says.

And she’s about to add that she is, in fact, okay with that, and she has no idea why John is making such a big fuss about it all in the first place, when she suddenly wonders whether the referral’s worked with Rafael. For a career covert operative, he’s managed to get around an awful lot and it’s not that uncommon to meet people who’ve worked with him. And they don’t always know that he and Melissa used to be married; McCall isn’t exactly a rare last name.

Which suits both of them just fine. Well, anyway, it suits Melissa since that means Rafael’s pack isn’t going to find out and try to pull some old-school werewolf nonsense about forcing their way into her and Scott’s lives, even though she and her son have been perfectly fine without them. And she assumes that Rafael agrees, seeing as he’s never bothered to tell his pack either. But…but keeping it a secret does make for some awkward conversations. He’s an outstanding agent, Melissa’s been told more than once. Insightful, proactive, willing to go the extra mile—all the things she wishes didn’t still end up feeling like salt in a wound.

“I’d really appreciate if you’d give me your thoughts on her file, but if you don’t want to come by and meet with the team leader, I understand,” John says, reading her mind. He’s put his phone away and twisted over to face Melissa, gaze open and waiting, and of course he steadies as soon as the problem’s out in the open, and if she didn’t need that quiet reassurance she’d laugh at him.

“I’ll think about it,” Melissa stalls. She bites her lip, just before she almost takes that back and insists on coming into the office just to prove she doesn’t care at all. But she’s made that mistake before, and with a son nearly off to college, she thinks she’s just a little old to keep standing on silly pride. “If you like her, I’ll have to get…I can take the file, anyway. I’m up late tonight, and Chris might be over later.”

“Did he say something to you?” John says, tone shifting a little sharp. “Is he all right?”

Melissa looks at him and shrugs, and then, when John swears under his breath and rubs at his face, reaches over to put her hand on his arm. “Like you said, if he wants to, he wants to. I did tell him if he’s feeling like he needs to vent, just to come over.”

“Yeah, well, I hope he takes you up on that,” John mutters. He rubs at his face a last time, then sighs and reaches down to dig into his bag. Pulls out a couple files before he finds the right one and hands it over. “I’m trying real hard not to drop hints to the FBI about leaving him alone, but then he starts talking about actually going into that motel and seeing if he can walk them through what the last Argent team did and…I don’t know, Mel. Sometimes I wish I could just get in that head of his and figure out why he’s putting himself through things.”

“I know, and I don’t think it hurts to ask him at some point,” Melissa says. She takes the file and hefts it in her hand, absently noting that it’s a little slim for the kind of person they’re looking for. “I kept meaning to have him over, see how he is about the whole thing, but I’ve been trying to deal with Scott, and…just haven’t gotten the time. If he comes over tonight, I’ll do it.”

John grunts as he pulls himself straight, narrowly missing a bang to the head on the steering wheel. “Scott all right? Stiles is worried he and Allison are having issues.”

“I think they’re fine. More fine than their poor parents,” Melissa mutters. Then glances over, sensing the curiosity, and shakes her head at John’s look. “It’s nothing, just the usual…wondering how I’m doing.”

“Well, every day Stiles doesn’t hand me unauthorized corpse paperwork is a good parent day in my book,” John says. He lets the side of his mouth quirk up as she gives him a shove in the arm, and then he leans over to kiss her. “Don’t want to waste any more of your break, and that stack of papers on your desk does look like it needs a good pie boost to get through. And no rush on the candidate, all right?”

“All right, all right. But I’ll look at it,” Melissa says. “God knows we can’t just have Stiles writing all the rejections again.”

John looks wounded, and then a little embarrassed. And then just a tiny bit proud. “Well, Mel, you have to admit, he’s been real creative with those basis codes. The HR people couldn’t even believe some of them were still active. We were doing them a service, getting them to weed out the outdated ones.”

“Oh…just because you bring me pie doesn’t mean I won’t weed a thing or two when it comes to the pair of you,” Melissa snorts, sliding out of the car. “Honestly, John, insufficient experience with petrification transformations?”

“It’s come up,” he says mildly, like the asshole he is under that dedicated Service agent and loving father act. He leans over and catches her arm, then kisses her again, till she’s almost about to slide back into the car. Then he pulls back, grinning. “One for Chris if he comes over.”

“He deserves it, but I’m not sure you do,” Melissa mutters. She slips the file under her arm and gives her scrubs a quick glance. Then she puts her hand up on the door to shut it. “John…thanks for the heads-up. You know my personal baggage…I’ll keep it out of work anyway, but it’s nice of you to consider it.”

John frowns at her. “It’s not nice, Mel, it’s just doing my diligence in building this office. We’ve got a decent team here and I’m not about to mess that up just to make HR stop pestering me about this open slot. I know you’d be professional but I’d be an idiot to make you waste your energy on that. You’re too good for that bullshit.”

Melissa knows she does good work, she does. She doesn’t have an inflated ego but she doesn’t believe in false humility either, if only because she thinks that makes it harder to figure out when she’s improving and when she’s backsliding. But—it’s nice to hear that from other people, she thinks, watching John drive away. So maybe, just maybe, she’s doing all right.

* * *

As it turns out, Chris doesn’t make it over. He does text her, apologizing, but his meeting ends well before her shift does. Melissa’s also gotten the impression that since Allison’s not out running around with Scott, she’s been making more time for her father, and so much as Melissa would love a ride home, she just tells Chris not to wait for her.

Scott being grounded means he’s not allowed to have the car either, although Beacon Hills’ size means she could call him and he’d run over in a few minutes. And Melissa has to admit that she’s a little tempted, when she finally gets off and feels the ache digging into the heels of her feet, up through the tendons running along the back of her ankles, and into the small of her back and the spot between her shoulders. But…she’s trying to teach Scott a lesson, not take advantage of his good nature, and so she drives herself home.

Her son’s got leftovers warming for her, and she’s almost certain he’s still awake, even though he’s in his bedroom and the door is shut. Still, she’s tired.

Tired but not sleepy, the curse of every late-night worker ever. She burns off some of the adrenaline finishing up the hospital paperwork at the kitchen table, with the living room TV on low volume and set to a marathon of a home-renovation show. She’s not really listening to it, but from what she gathers, the gimmick is that one of the renovators is a hedgewitch, and the other is a licensed engineer, and they argue a lot about whether magic or design is more durable.

“I’m not getting anywhere like this,” she mutters, pushing away the last of the papers. She knows she still isn’t ready to go to bed, so she changes into her pajamas, and then comes back down to settle on the couch with a blanket and a mug of warm milk.

And the FBI candidate’s file, just on a whim. It happened to be sticking out on the counter when she was getting the mug out of the microwave, and she takes it with her out of some stubborn desire to not feel useless. Melissa doesn’t actually intend to do anything with it, but during a commercial break she idly flips it open, and then something catches her eye.

She frowns and looks at the sheet more closely, then picks it up for a third look. But no, there it is in black and white: the candidate’s not FBI at all. U.S. marshal, then technically went private but had a long string of consultant posts with various government agencies. The FBI is one of them, and is the most recent—and also one of the few that isn’t redacted. No wonder the file is so skinny.

The redacted ones all are intelligence agencies, and that includes domestic and foreign, which makes even Melissa’s sluggish brain take notice. It’s been a while since she looked at the job posting John wrote up, but she’s pretty sure that they didn’t have anything on there about foreign counterintelligence. That’s not the Service’s forte at all, the occasional cross-border joint conservation effort aside. Of course, Stiles’ mother’s family being who they are, experience with foreign policy might be a bonus, but…

Melissa reaches out and picks up her phone, and gets halfway through texting John when the TV suddenly blares at her. She jumps and presses a button, and then, as the TV turns off, she looks down and just shakes her head. Because that’s not her phone, that’s the remote.

“Mom?” Scott says from the doorway. When she turns around, he looks a little hesitant but he stays where he is. “Hey, did you need something? I heard you, um, kind of yelp.”

“About five hours’ more sleep than I think I will be getting,” Melissa says, putting down the remote. She closes the file, then gets off the couch and comes around that. She can wait to ask John in the morning; it’s not like the candidate’s going to get interviewed any time soon, and anyway, he’s going to have the same questions when he looks at the file. “No, I’m fine. Go back to bed, you’ve got school.”

“Okay, if you’re sure,” Scott says. He goes up the stairs ahead of her, but then lingers at the landing to watch her go into her room. “Do you want me to wake you in the morning? You’ve got your hair appointment at ten, so I can get you before I leave for school.”

Melissa starts to remind her son that she does have an alarm clock, and then she remembers just how much of that text she composed on the TV remote. “Thanks, baby, just—give the door a knock. You don’t have to come in, I don’t want Finstock to fuss at you for being late.”

“I’m suspended from practice for the rest of this week, Mom,” Scott reminds her. Not pointedly or resentfully, just bringing it to her attention. He even smiles sympathetically when she winces. “Well, okay, see you in the morning.”

“’night, baby,” Melissa says, and then she flops right onto her bed.

A few minutes later, or so it seems, she turns over as the door rattles, and sees daylight creeping over the windowsill. Melissa groans and pushes out her arm, then pulls it back as she hears the rustle of paper. She pries her eyes a little more open and then sees that she hadn’t even remembered to put the candidate file away. Which is very, very bad document security practice and she’s flustered and grabbing at it even as Scott calls out that he’s on his way out, his footsteps receding down the hall.

After a shower and breakfast, she’s starting to feel a little more like a competent human being, so she sits down at the kitchen table with the file. But first she checks her phone, just in case anything happened overnight.

There are a couple texts from John complaining about the FBI agents he’s hosting, and one asking her whether she’s free for lunch. Scott texted her too, and judging from the timestamps, he did it while walking into school; he’s reminding her about her appointments for the day. A few others are from friends and coworkers—Peter wants to know if she can dig up somebody to round out their poker game, since he’s apparently got nobody he needs to smooze this week—and then, buried way at the end, there’s a terse text from Chris saying he needs to be out of town for part of today and asking whether Allison can go over to her house if he runs late.

That’s not unusual. Allison was heading over to Melissa’s house whenever she couldn’t go home since before her father knew about it; ever since her grandfather tried to kidnap her, she’s just as careful as he is about making sure she’s not home alone, even if she and Chris have disagreed about who should be keeping her company. But that’s well on its way to healing over, and at this point, Chris usually just lets Melissa know, and if Melissa can’t be home for some reason, she’ll just say. 

What’s unusual, Melissa figures out after a moment, is that Chris is asking. She texts back that it’s fine, it’s her off-day, but she sits and stares at her phone for a few minutes, wondering if she should ask what he’s up to.

Melissa ultimately decides against it, because she’s not the man’s babysitter, and however they play around, she’s not his alpha. Being free to use his own judgment is important to Chris, and given Melissa’s stance on packs, she’d be a hypocrite if she didn’t respect that.

“Still, I keep having this nagging feeling that something’s not right,” she says to John when they sit down for lunch. “It’s just like when Scott was telling me he was trying to make friends with some of the other weres, and it turned out he and Allison were meeting up in the preserve.”

John pushes aside the menu without looking at it and just tells the waitress he’ll have the usual. They’re at a café a couple miles from the preserve entrance, popular both for its roast dip sandwiches and for the fact that it’s the closest restaurant to the Forest Service office by ten minutes, and John must be a regular since the waitress just nods and turns to Melissa. Who is not, because the café doesn’t open for dinner, let alone when she usually gets off work, and who spends a minute looking the menu over before ordering a salad.

“Speaking of things that aren’t right,” John says, raising his brow.

“I can eat healthy. I’m a healthcare professional who’s raising a teenage boy,” Melissa says, kicking him under the table. Then she slouches in her seat and gives her neck a surreptitious rub. She’d badly needed the trip to the hair salon—any longer without a good thinning and her hair would be poofing like a haybale—but she must have rested on the sink edge wrong because she’s got a huge sore spot. “Honestly, my stomach’s feeling a little rough. Not sure why, didn’t have my usual glass of wine to kick back last night. Maybe it’s just worrying too much. Between Scott and Chris…anyway. What do you know?”

“Should I even try and pretend I don’t know which one of them you’re asking about?” John says. Just then his phone buzzes and he slips it out of his pocket, his brow furrowing as he checks it. “It’s the FBI investigation, and he volunteered, and I don’t know a hell of a lot more than that. I’m trying to stay out of it, to be honest. Bad enough you and Tara had to do the initial scene security, and then I’ve got Stiles fishing for updates, and does this office not have enough work that we have to go stealing it from other agencies?”

Melissa laughs and then moves her arm as the waitress returns with their drinks. She peels the paper off her straw and starts playing with it, curling it around her fingers. “It has been pretty quiet so far as the tree goes, hasn’t it? I don’t think I’ve seen a patrol alert in a few weeks.”

John mutters something about that bad campus visit where Stiles was temporarily snatched and the Hales sending around threatening gift baskets to neighboring packs, and they share an eyeroll. And then he sighs and leans over the table, and the uneasy feeling returns to Melissa’s gut. “They’re going back over to the motel for a walk-through, that’s all I know. Well, and that it’s not for an exorcism, they’re not there yet. Still trying to figure where the curse is anchored in the first place. It’s just…I can’t be hands-off with the investigation, but then go shoving my nose in because of Chris. It doesn’t look right.”

“I know,” Melissa says.

“Well, great, then maybe you can tell me why it makes me feel like one of those jackasses who keep passing the buck,” John says sharply. Then he grimaces. He shoots her an apologetic look and puts his hand out, and then gives her a little chagrined shrug when she waves that away. “Sorry. I just—I’m guessing they want help straightening out something in the old reports. The place has been renovated since the Argent team went through, and probably the architecture doesn’t match up anymore, or the reports have some cryptic Old World notation, or…I’m picking at a scab, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know that I’d go that far, but you’re wiggling around like a little kid who needs the bathroom,” Melissa observes. She smiles as John cringes again, but then sighs. “Yeah, I know, and I didn’t get a chance to talk to him, take his temperature about things. He didn’t come over.”

John frowns. “Did he not sleep last night?”

Now Melissa frowns. “He texted me, I thought he got out at eight. That’s plenty early.”

“Yeah, but he told me he wasn’t going home—I was asking whether he wanted to grab some leftovers from us for his and Allison’s dinner, because Peter brought over another spread from Talia’s kitchen,” John says slowly. “I just figured he was going to yours, didn’t ask, I was trying to wrap up and get home myself. And then I know the FBI team left at six this morning.”

Melissa starts to say something, then stops herself because she doesn’t feel certain about it. She could throw out a lot of ideas about what Chris might have done with that time, but they’re just ideas. “And I told him not to wait for me,” she says to herself. “Damn it.”

“If he’s keeping it quiet, you can’t really blame yourself for missing it,” John says. He’s soothing without being cloying about it, just stating the facts in a calm way. Though he’s still frowning. And checking his phone again. “Well, Allison didn’t call Scott, right? So he must have made it home at some point. Look, I gave the team leader my cell and he seems pretty decent so far. If something goes wrong, I think he’s smart enough to back out and call for reinforcements.”

Melissa almost reminds John that Allison and Scott haven’t really been talking, but…if Allison was really worried about her father, she’d call somebody. If not Scott, then Stiles or Lydia, or maybe even Melissa herself. So they’re probably just fretting over nothing. Chris can stay out late without reporting his every move to them. He doesn’t have to tell them what he’s doing with the FBI either; it’s not their investigation, and how he handles his family issues is his business. 

She does feel for Chris. He’s so dedicated to hunting, and it’s not just for the sake of upholding his family legacy. He gets involved because he wants to make sure it’s done right, and really does help more than it hurts. But no matter what he does, life just keeps turning up time after time where his family’s let people down, and that’s just what it feels like to Melissa looking in on the outside; Chris probably feels like he’s been handed a thousand more failures. If Melissa was in his place, she’s not too sure how willing she’d be to talk about it either.

John’s been waiting on Melissa in silence, she suddenly realizes. She raises her brows at him and he shrugs, signaling that he wasn’t sure if she was comfortable and didn’t want to interrupt if that was the case. And then the waitress brings out Melissa’s salad, and it’s a long enough break that Melissa honestly doesn’t feel that comfortable going back into Chris. She’s still worried, but she keeps telling herself she needs to treat him like he should be treated, and that’s like an adult.

“I looked at the file a little bit,” she finally says. She waits a couple seconds to see if John’s got soup or anything coming out, but the waitress just plops down a breadbasket and then walks off. “Not much, so I don’t really think I’m—I just was wondering, is that the only candidate we’ve got?”

“No, I got a few from Deaton after I saw him, but his referrals are all pretty solidly placed where they are, and they’ve got political connections that…well, might help, but it’d be a lot of vetting, and I was just thinking with the Hales and Stiles’ mother’s family already in the picture, an outsider might be good,” John says. He pokes at the basket till Melissa clears her throat, then meekly picks out a roll and starts pinching bits off to eat. “I got a couple informal internal ones too, but…I’m not requiring Nemeton experience, but I at least want to see that people have dealt with some kind of guardian before.”

Melissa crunches through a bite of the salad, then adds more dressing. And kicks John again when he looks at her, because he’s the one whose son is concerned about his cholesterol levels. Between the Service and the hospital, she runs around more than enough to keep in shape. “So I was asking, is she it?”

“No,” John says, mock-glowering at her. Then he pulls his phone out and holds it over the table as he scrolls through his messages. “Actually, I just got a new one this morning, from an ex-military buddy of mine.”

“Army?” Melissa says.

“Used to be, explosives specialist, but he got a medical discharge. Private security consultant now, but he’s looking for more stability,” John says. He sounds a little hesitant and when Melissa prods his foot, he glances away before looking at her. “The guy who recced him hasn’t ever steered me wrong, but…I don’t know, he doesn’t have any experience with environmental work. Resume’s solid otherwise, but that’s a big hole.”

Melissa starts to answer, but catches the waitress coming out of the corner of her eye. She waits till John’s got his dip sandwich and has a bite in his mouth, and then she points her fork at him. “If that’s it, the position’s not really a conservation role, and anyway, correct me if I’m wrong, but you didn’t have a lot of environmental background either.”

John makes a face at her. “Yeah, but I married into it. Actually, if you want to get it straight, I did a year-long boot camp run by one of the world’s foremost authorities in Nemeton ecosystems, and _then_ I married into it.”

“You’re bragging,” Melissa snorts. “You are bragging, and I can smell it a mile away, John.”

He gives her a little acknowledging nod, and then cocks his head inquiringly. “So you’re not so impressed with the other one?”

“I said I only looked a little bit at her, and I was tired and had about a thousand other things on my mind at the time,” Melissa says, glaring at him again. Then she looks at the window beside them, checking the other diners in the reflection. The place isn’t that full and nobody seems to be paying them much attention, but still, she hasn’t lasted so long in the Service by being sloppy. “Did you want to move this out to the parking lot?”

John pauses with his dripping sandwich a few inches from his mouth. He looks at it, then at her, and then at it again, his expression shifting from uncertain to regretful to playfully sly. “Well, I was thinking you’d still be dead on your feet, so I was telling the office it’d be a short lunch, but—ow, God, Mel, are those steel tips?”

“No, just built-up anger at the male ego,” Melissa says, though she’s smiling. She looks down at her salad, covertly wiggling her foot out of her shoe, and then she slides her leg under the table so that she can brush the spot she just kicked with her foot. Just grazing her toes up under the cuff of his pants-leg till she hits the bare skin above the sock.

He sucks in his breath and hitches up, his fingers digging deep into the soft sandwich bread, and she giggles. Pulls her foot back, but keeps her toes brushing over the top of his shoe.

“This is a good sandwich,” John says, just a little mournful, as he looks at it. “I was looking forward to this.”

“Sometimes I wonder why we put up with you,” Melissa says. And then she signals for the waitress, so she can get the jerk a take-out container.

* * *

Melissa honestly is not planning on having sex in the back of John’s SUV, which, with the spare sleeping bag he keeps stowed in it, isn’t nearly enough steps above screwing in the backseat like a teenager. They’re both parents with children and former spouses, and professionals with steady incomes who can afford better. And given all the times they end up with bruises and aches on the job, they owe it to themselves to spend their leisure time in comfort.

It’s just, well, John has this way of pulling out a slow, understated smile, and even in a Park Service coat and rumpled jeans that’ve seen better days—he ditches the uniform trousers whenever he can, calling it a seniority perk—he has that kind of tall, well-built body that’s always made Melissa weak in the knees. So she gets in his car, and into his lap, and she thinks they’ll just make out a little bit before they have the work conversation. And then his hands come around and cup her ass, and they’re just so damn wide, with a spread that wraps each buttock almost completely.

So she pushes off his coat and gets her fingers around his ridiculous-for-his-age biceps, and his tongue flutters in her mouth as he groans, and they end up squirming out of the driver’s seat. They don’t get into the back, because Melissa loses her balance and tips backwards with an embarrassing squeal into shotgun, and John follows her, those broad hands sliding to her thighs, and then going up to hook her panties out of the way.

God, she loves his mouth. He eats her out like he’s been planning the whole time for that to be his lunch, his tongue just the right side of hard and pushy, and then, just as she’s cresting, he slips his finger into her and crooks it up so it feels like she’s catching herself on her own pleasure.

Melissa’s shaky after that, she has to admit. She tries to at least get out of the seat, since with her legs sprawled in the air she feels just a little self-conscious, and never mind that John’s SUV has NSA-grade privacy tinting, but just ends up sprawling in John’s lap instead. He’s laughing at her, nuzzling into her hair, and she puts up with it till she’s got enough breath back to get her hand down into his pants.

And then he’s gasping for her, harsh and heavy into the side of her neck as she works his cock. John’s accidental alpha attitude comes out everywhere but the bedroom, and in the bedroom—well, he just doesn’t seem to be able to help it with Chris, but with Melissa he’s never really been like that. They’ve got a pretty even give-and-take most of the time.

Except once in a while John just…settles back for the ride, and sucks Melissa into it, and she finds herself like now, looming over him, giving him teasing kisses as he groans and chases the pressure of her hand. He could reach up and move things along if he wanted to, but he doesn’t. Just keeps his fingers plastered to his seat, even as the sweat’s slicking down the side of his face, staring up at her with hazy, wanting eyes. It’s not the flat-out urgent desperation that Chris gets, that fever-pitch of need before the begging starts, but it’s enough to make Melissa bite her lip, feeling a sudden sharp heat between her legs.

She’s still wobbly, but hell with it, she decides, it’s her off-day. Melissa hikes up over John, stretching his cock up with one hand till the tip’s just brushing her clit, and then she grinds down onto him. Doesn’t take him in, but he swears and jerks and then throws back his head and comes all the same.

“You know, maybe you should think about how bad the new person’s going to be about noticing when you come in smelling like sex,” Melissa says, pushing the hair out of John’s eyes. “I don’t think anybody you’ve told me about yet has an enhanced sense of smell, but—”

“I think even regular humans are gonna be able to tell when we get up to stuff like this,” John huffs. He gasps a little, then slumps back, his hands resting on her hips. They’re light but still tight enough to keep her from shifting off. “Gonna have to sneak into the shower when I get back.”

Melissa laughs at him and strokes his hair again, and then lets him pull her down into a kiss. Then she pulls away, swearing a little. “Oh, God, I’ll have to do that too. Scott’s still grounded, he’ll be—” she checks the time and swears again “—I’ll have about five minutes to rinse off before I need to go pick him up.”

“Stiles doesn’t always do the best job of descenting, and I’m pretty sure Derek doesn’t even bother unless somebody bugs him. Can’t be the first time Scott’s had to hold his nose,” John says.

She hits him on the arm, then climbs off his lap. John winces and rubs his arm, but his eyes are lingering on her ass as she tugs her underwear back up. Still, they’re both getting more serious, recalling themselves to the rest of their lives as sane, sober adults.

“Hey,” John says suddenly. “You and Scott, you’re fine? Because if he’s giving you the silent treatment or anything, I can talk to him if you want. I’ve given Stiles plenty of—”

“What, no, he’s—believe me, the last thing he needs is another lecture. He’s already being an angel about it, I think yelling at him any more might just send him…well, no, it’ll send me off…to the psych ward, maybe,” Melissa mutters. She pulls down the car shade and uses the mirror on its back to start finger-combing her hair into order. “I’m just overthinking things. We’re fine. I just need to…to…”

“You know just because he didn’t follow what you’ve taught him once, it doesn’t mean he hasn’t been listening to you, right?” John says. When Melissa looks—well, honestly, jerks her head around and stares at him, John offers her a wry smile. “It’s just kids come up with their own ideas and some of them, they’re gonna test for themselves no matter what you say or do. But they’re still listening to you. Trust me, Mel, I’ve been through enough arguments, counterarguments, detailed post-mission breakdowns and violated rules with Stiles to know. It’s just—they listen, but sometimes it doesn’t show up the way you expect. It still doesn’t mean you’re bringing them up wrong.”

“I…know,” Melissa says. She pauses and takes her fingers out of her hair and looks at them, and then she drops her hands into her lap. Then she looks over at John, who’s still smiling at her. “I knew that. I know that. I…but I needed to hear it again. Chris said that too—but I wasn’t listening, and…anyway, thanks.”

John’s smile gets a little more self-deprecating. “Well, given what my kid puts me through, might as well squeeze all the benefit I can from it. Anyway, I’ll get you home for that shower, and I’ll let you know if I hear anything from Chris.”

“Are you going to stay at the office and wait for him?” Melissa says.

“They’re not supposed to be back till late and I don’t have enough work, believe it or not, to keep me occupied,” John says after a long pause. “Alibi aside, I think I’d just end up fretting and he’ll pick up on that. But I did ask the night ranger to let me know when they’re back and I’m planning to go back to the office, see if I can catch them on the way out.”

Melissa nods. She’s a little reluctant to leave it like that, but she can’t see any reason to disagree with him. “He did ask if Allison could stay with me, if he’s really late. I can just make sure she gets him to bed—she’ll probably do that anyway, but…”

“One way or the other, he’ll get covered,” John says. “I think it’ll be all right, Mel. That damn motel has had a long run, but I do think we’ve got people who actually know what they’re doing now. That should be enough.”

* * *

“Hey, Mom,” Scott says, tossing his bag into the backseat. He comes around to the front passenger door, waving to a friend, and climbs into the car. He inhales a little, pauses, and then does his best to smile without looking like he’s trying to breathe shallowly.

Melissa had managed to shower, but she hadn’t been able to fit in washing her hair, and her son has a lot of talents, but convincingly lying isn’t one of them. She suppresses a grimace and just turns up the air-conditioning as they pull out of the parking lot. “Hey, baby, how was school?”

“Okay. I got a B on the English exam, but then Harris assigned us a surprise research paper that’s due at the end of this month,” Scott says, starting brightly and then ending on a sigh. Then he straightens up nervously. “Also, we got paired up for the paper and I’m working with Isaac. He—he asked if he could come over tonight, because Laura’s coming home from college and he has a lot of pack stuff with her, but I said I’d check with you first.”

The end of the month is only a week away, and not for the first time, Melissa wonders just how someone who so patently despises students and teaching could hang onto a job as long as Adrian Harris. “Well, I appreciate that you thought to ask first, but I think that that’s all right,” she says. “What time was he thinking?”

“After dinner, probably seven or so,” Scott says. He pauses, still looking at her, and then takes a deep breath. “I promised you I’d do better, Mom.”

He’s so close to leaving home and starting his own life, her son, and yet when Melissa looks over, something about the way Scott’s holding himself makes her think of him as a tiny, whimpering baby. Maybe it’s how he’s so lowkey about it, staying in his seat, not pushing over or posturing up, and yet he has determination written all over the lifted tilt of his jaw and the steadiness of his gaze.

Scott hadn’t been much of a crier when he’d been a newborn. He’d caught Melissa and her ex more than a little by surprise, but Melissa’s parents had still been in the States and they’d been living near her large extended family at that point, so it wasn’t like Melissa hadn’t cared for babies before. She’d already been planning to head to nursing school too, and so she’d thought she’d known what to expect. But Scott had just been so damn _quiet_ , not like the babies she’d watched before, and then she’d found out he was a werewolf, which just made her feel even more as if she was never going to get a handle on him.

She’d found out later that were babies tend not to cry as much. Human babies are unreasonably loud compared to the rest of the animal kingdom, whose offspring have the good sense to try and stay quiet so danger doesn’t find them. And she’d rolled up her sleeves and taught herself everything she needed to know about werewolves, and about her own kid. It’s just…much as she’s glad Scott isn’t a natural troublemaker like Stiles, she still sometimes worries that she’s missing something, that maybe he just doesn’t feel comfortable enough to let her know when things are wrong. Just the same as when she’d first looked down at a tiny, whining werewolf, and wondered whether she looked as alien to him as he did to her.

“We didn’t really talk about exactly what was the problem,” Melissa says after a few minutes, once they’re through the tricky after-school traffic and into a quieter section of town. Still, she decides to just pull up next to the curb and park the car.

Scott looks a little wary, though he never has that shiftiness Stiles can get. “We…didn’t?”

“Well, we talked about it a bit,” Melissa says. She remembers the fifteen-minute scolding she gave Scott in the hotel parking lot the morning after, and then she sighs and tilts her head to the side. “Okay. More than a bit. But that’s not what—I went over why I was mad at you, but I didn’t…Scott, there’s nothing wrong with helping people. I love that you care so much—you’re a good person for worrying about people you don’t even know.”

“But I need to not break the rules, right?” Scott offers.

“That—look, you’re almost off to college, and much as I’d like to still act like there’s a simple answer, I think you’re old enough to see right through that,” Melissa says. Then she shakes her head as Scott starts to say otherwise. “No, no, it’s not about being nice to me, it’s about the truth. You’re smart, and you’ve watched Stiles dig enough holes—and talk himself right back out of them, and—and I’m rambling, I know that, but I just want you to understand that I’m not treating you two differently.”

Scott laughs, though it’s more than a little nervous. “Mom, I know that. We’re different, and he has different—he’s got the tree and his pack, and his dad…”

“And I will yell at him no matter who he has with him if I think he’s earned it,” Melissa says sharply. Because Stiles _has_ tried that nonsense before and honestly, she’s still a little disappointed in him for even thinking that she’d let some career military man with no children—no matter how many general’s stars he has—tell her anything about parenting. At least he’d only been silly enough to do that once. “No, he did break the rules too, but he was…he was smart about it this time, and I don’t mean smart in that he did it so he could get away with it better. I mean he was smart that…Scott, if you want to help people, you have to be in shape for it when you get to them. That doesn’t mean never risk getting yourself hurt, because sometimes you have to, but—you have to be smart about it.”

“Like how I was running across the roof to stop the air conditioner, and Peter just shut off the power?” Scott says, nodding. Then he ducks his heads and rubs his hand over the top of it, looking embarrassed. “Yeah, I’ve been…I’ve been thinking it over, and I don’t…I don’t even really know what I was thinking I was going to do, just punch the units till they broke? Except that’d probably spread whatever it was even more, if it was airborne in the first place.”

“That’s what I mean about being smart,” Melissa says. And then she can’t help himself anymore and she reaches over to wrap her hand around the back of his neck.

Scott huffs a little, then leans over and lets her pull them together, purring as she cuddles him. “I know. I was pretty stupid about all of it—just panicking. And you always tell me, the first lesson of being a first responder is, you have to be calm, or you’ll never figure out what to do.”

“You’re still a teenager, Scott. Nobody’s born being calm, and don’t you ever let anybody ever tell you any different.” Melissa moves her hand up to pet her son’s hair a few times, and then lets him go. “I just was so mad this time because you had other people with you, but you didn’t listen to them either. You’re usually so good about that.”

“I know, I know,” Scott says, wincing. He leans back as she starts up the car, fiddling with the zipper on his coat. “Stiles and Allison both—and Stiles forgave me, but Allison’s still pretty upset, not that I blame her.”

Melissa lets the car slow for a second, then makes herself finish pulling out into the road. “Are you two going to talk about it?” she finally says.

She doesn’t want to meddle too much, both because of Chris and because honestly, Scott and Allison have been together for so long, they should be working things out themselves. If they really mean to be that serious, then they’ll have to learn to do that—and much as her instinct is to jump to Scott’s defense, she knows he’ll just be worse off if she interferes on his behalf.

“We already did,” Scott says. He looks at Melissa and some of her concern must be showing, because he gives her a hasty, reassuring smile and shakes his head. “No, we talked, she’s just…it’s one of those things where she needs some time, and I probably—I really wasn’t thinking, and I should work out how to do that, so it doesn’t happen again.”

He trails off a little near the end, putting one arm up on the window and pushing the heel of his hand into the side of his jaw so the words mush together. Melissa pretends not to check on him, and Scott fidgets some more, and then they both sigh at the same time.

“It’s just—she takes the whole leadership thing really seriously, and—and she was saying, if I’m acting like that, where it’s like I don’t trust her to work with me, it’s hard for her to know how I’ll be in an emergency. Which is a good point,” Scott says. He rushes it and has to take a deep breath afterward, which also makes him sag a little bit. “It’s just then she started talking about what else that meant, if I wasn’t listening to her, and it got…I don’t know, Mom, it’s like she thinks it’s her fault when I was the one who wasn’t listening.”

Melissa frowns. For some reason that seems familiar, but she can’t ever remember hearing Allison talk like that before. “Did she say why it’d be her fault?”

“Something about, she’s supposed to be strong enough to get me to listen, but now she’s not sure now. I don’t know. That’s when she said she needed to think about it more,” Scott says.

Not Allison, Melissa suddenly realizes. Chris. He’s said things like that, talking about how he’d tried to persuade his father to be less of a psychopath, or to get the rest of his family to rein in Gerard and Kate. “Does she think that the motel is her fault? The curse?”

“No, she—” Then Scott stops. He slouches down, thinking hard, and then he groans and puts his hand to the side of his face. “Mom, you don’t really think…she wasn’t even born! I mean, I thought… _Chris_ was…was he even born when Alexander Argent died?”

“He was, but he was only a couple years old,” Melissa says, just stopping herself from adding _not that that’s stopped him from feeling guilty over it_. “The Old World families, they’re a lot different about this sort of thing. I…know it’s hard to make sense of it. We don’t belong to one, and I know Stiles’ mother did, but his parents were very careful to not raise him like that. They’re just a whole different kind of society, with the way they handle traditions.”

“Yeah, but that’s not really a tradition. That was just…not their fault,” Scott says, frowning. “They didn’t know, it’s not like Gerard told them he was just ignoring the whole thing. If they had, I’m sure they would’ve tried to do something about it by now.”

Melissa can’t help a sigh then. “I know, and we just have to keep telling them that.”

That’s a little bit of a slip. Scott looks over and Melissa flushes, but thankfully, they’re pulling up to the house and the shady interior of the garage helps to hide the red. And her son’s too polite to prod when his mother has a moment of weakness, unlike some of his friends.

They get out of the car, and Melissa remembers she has a few packages in the trunk from errands earlier in the day, which she’d forgotten to grab in her rush to get home and shower. Scott helps her get them out and carry them in, and then he settles down at the kitchen table with his homework while she pulls out her still-incomplete paperwork.

And the FBI candidate file. She’s just leafing through the shooting range scores when Scott clears his throat. “Hey, Mom?”

“Hmmm, baby?” Melissa says.

“I just wanted to let you know, you were really cool how you came in and got everybody out of the motel, and handled Finstock. I didn’t get a chance to tell you that yet, since—” Scott looks embarrassed again “—I was making everybody worry, but…you were. And I just…the next time something like this happens, I’m going to try really hard to be just like that.”

Melissa looks up from the file. Her son smiles at her, warm but uncertain enough around the edges that she knows he genuinely means it, even if she didn’t know what a terrible liar he is. She…she feels a little uncomfortable for a moment because even if she knows she’s competent, she doesn’t know if she deserves that kind of unquestioning admiration, and then she feels bad for hesitating about her son.

She smiles back. It’s a little stiff, at least to her, but Scott doesn’t seem to notice. He grins a little wider, and then he bends back to his schoolwork. He misspells a word—she can see that even upside-down and across the table—and Melissa coughs, then, when he looks up, nods at the paper. Scott glances down, frowns for a second and then sees it, and sheepishly crosses the word out and writes the right spelling above it.

He’s a good kid, she thinks. And the two of them, they’ll get there.

* * *

It’s supposed to be a quiet evening. Melissa only has a half-shift the next day, so when she gets tired of filling out forms, she grabs a book she’s been meaning to read and makes a pot of tea, and fully intends to spend the rest of the night in her bedroom with it. Isaac’s come over to work with Scott on that paper and the two boys are still downstairs, but she can hear them moving towards the door as Isaac gets ready to leave.

On his way out, Isaac says something about lacrosse—well, Melissa doesn’t catch more than “Finstock,” but that’s about all she needs to guess that he’s asking if Scott will be back in time for the next match. Scott will be; Melissa debated a little about it, but nobody got hurt, and being a mom means she needs to be pragmatic as well as principled. The Service offers a pretty generous tuition support package, but college is so expensive these days that it still won’t cover everything. Not unless Scott sticks to the local community college, and much to Melissa’s relief and pride—and all right, gratitude for Stiles’ boot camp cram course—Scott’s SAT scores had been high enough to balance out his mediocre grades. He’s got some very good regional schools to pick from, if they can find the money for it.

A sports scholarship will help a lot, and thanks to some politicking by Stiles and the Hales, the lacrosse team has firm promises from a number of scouts to come to the match. So Melissa’s letting her son play in it, with fingers crossed that it leads to a good offer.

She’s just thinking she might as well let Scott start going to practice a couple days earlier than she originally said, too. He might be a werewolf, but even weres still need to practice working as a team. And anyway, the point of punishment isn’t just to make Scott feel terrible—it’s to make sure the lessons that he learns stick to him, and he does seem to have taken them to heart. He might not object to being kept in for longer, but it’s not going to be doing anything for him, and at the end of the day, all Melissa wants is for him to be as good as she knows he can be.

So Melissa’s not really reading her book, mulling that over as she flips the pages, and then she hears Scott’s voice suddenly rise through the floor. He’s back in the kitchen from the sound of things, but then his feet come running up the steps.

She gets out of bed and opens the door just as Scott pants up onto the second floor, holding his phone. “Mom,” he says. “Mom, listen, Allison’s…she says Chris came home and he was acting strange, and now—now he’s not in their house, but the car’s still there, and she doesn’t know where he went, he didn’t leave a message or anything.”

Melissa swears and takes a step out, then catches her hand on the side of the doorway and swings back into the bedroom. She grabs her coat, keys, and phone, and then she hurries down the stairs with Scott at her heels. “How long since she noticed he was gone?” she says.

She grabs her bag, and then ducks into the downstairs bathroom and flips open the cabinets so she can start grabbing the spare medical supplies she keeps there. Scott watches her with the phone plastered to his ear, nodding frantically as Allison’s clearly panicky voice crackles out. “She says…maybe fifteen minutes? And she says, when she means weird, she says—she means he was talking about things being his fault, and she knows he talks like that but he was doing it to _her_ and he never says that stuff to her, just to you or to Stiles’ dad, and he looked off, and—and Mom, she says he was helping the FBI, did he go back to the motel?”

“He might have,” Melissa mutters, grabbing an extra couple syringes of blockers. She hears Scott suck in his breath and snatches up her bag, then turns around to take him by the arm. “I’ll go over, and I’ll call John on the way. You stay here, and keep Allison on the line. If she doesn’t feel safe—”

“She says she’s fine. She checked all the guns and they’re all locked up, and she’s got the only keys,” Scott relays. He trots with Melissa to the garage, but then stops at the door with obvious reluctance. “She says she doesn’t want to come here in case he comes back, but she can—she’s got her taser and some other stuff, she can protect herself.”

“Well, anyway, keep talking to her, and tell her I’ll be over in just a few minutes,” Melissa says.

Scott nods. He lets her get almost all the way out the door, busy telling Allison everything Melissa’s just said, and then he lunges out and gives Melissa a tight, wordless hug. Be careful, he means, and Melissa gives him a quick squeeze before jumping into the car.

Melissa has John on the phone before she’s halfway down the driveway. “Where the hell are these FBI people?”

 _“Strapped to stretchers and getting taken to the hospital,”_ is what John says, since she didn’t bother with hello either. He sounds like he’s moving around a lot, and she can hear Stiles’ excited voice in the background, though she can’t make out what Stiles is saying. _“I don’t know what—it was some delayed-reaction thing, they were all fine, Chris stopped over with them, and then he went home, or was supposed to go home, and the rest went to their hotel, and we just got lucky the leader stayed to talk to me because he went into a fit right in front of us—”_

“Damn it,” Melissa says, running a red light. She swerves around a very slow car, and then nearly overbalances her car taking the next turn. “Fit? What kind of fit?”

 _“Hallucinations, cold sweat, elevated heart rate, dilated pupils…”_ John’s voice briefly fades out and she hears Stiles yelling at somebody to—yelling at the tree to be more specific, there are a lot of tunnels in the preserve, just give him the top-side view _“…not straight-up suicidal, some memory thing, some of them were ranting about prior cases…you heading over to his house?”_

Melissa is parking, as a matter of fact. The front door promptly opens and Allison comes running down the front yard towards her. “That kind of problem, they don’t usually go that far from things that mean something to them. I figured best to start at the house and work out.”

 _“Okay, yeah, Stiles is trying to check the preserve but there’s an FBI agent wandering around too, we…you found which one?”_ John says, his voice fading out again.

“Hey, thank you so much for coming, I think I’ve got a trail,” Allison says breathlessly. She’s got her taser in hand, and has a flashlight in the other, and nearly smashes them together as she throws her arms around Melissa.

She’s barely hugged Melissa before she’s twisting them around and hurrying them down the road, where the neighborhood starts to peter out into undeveloped land. They’re still well off from the preserve but there’s a small park, and the odd vacant lot. Allison waves the flashlight around, muttering and pointing things out that she doesn’t hold the light on long enough for Melissa to actually see, but Melissa trusts that the girl knows what she’s talking about.

“What did your dad say?” she asks when Allison pauses to catch her breath.

“That—that none of this would’ve happened if he’d just—if he’d just had enough balls, and everybody’s going to realize that sooner or later, and he’s—” Allison stumbles, and her voice gets shaky with something besides simple lack of air “—he’s going to take care of something else his family didn’t, and Melissa, I texted Stiles because I didn’t know—do you think he meant the Hales?”

All the blood in Melissa’s body turns to ice for a second. She had to stop, and almost walk herself through the steps of taking a breath, because she just—she can’t even think. She can’t think.

Melissa lurches forward, zombie-like, because the sheer amount of fear in her just won’t let her stay still. And for all that she knows, she might have just taken off running right then, competent, experienced adult or not, if Allison hadn’t made a small, terrified sound.

That brings her up. Reminds her it’s not just her, she’s got other people to take care of, deal with, and she shakes her head and steps back, looking blindly around. Puts her hand up and thumps the side of her forehead with it, trying to jar the neurons into working. “That’s…I don’t think that’s how your dad thinks, Allison,” she says, groping her way along, word by word, thought by thought. “Your grandfather and your aunt _did_ try to go after them, so even if Chris thought that was something that needed to be done…and he doesn’t, he absolutely doesn’t. He…it has to be something else. Something in Beacon Hills that your family didn’t try to tackle, and he thinks they should have.”

“Well, what?” Allison half-demands, half-hiccups. Her voice is a strange, strangled thing, which might be funny in any other situation, but which just makes Melissa put an arm around her now. “What else is it? Because he doesn’t tell me about things like that, he just says it’s not my fault but either I’m a leader in the family or I’m not, and if I’m a leader, I should be the one who takes care of it when we mess up, and he just keeps it in and feels worse and worse, and—”

Sharp, overlapping, electronic noises make them start into each other. One noise is Melissa’s phone, and when she realizes that, she bites back a swear and yanks it out; the other…is Allison’s phone, but Allison stares at it for a second before her eyes widen and she almost hurts herself slapping it to her ear.

 _“Stiles found the FBI guy, Laura and some rangers are getting him so I’m heading over to you,”_ John suddenly says. _“Are you still at Chris’ house?”_

“You heard all of that?” Allison’s says, her face seizing up as embarrassment fights with fear. “Never mind, Scott, I don’t have time for—what? What… _what_?”

“Just down the street from it, Allison’s got us following his tr—” Melissa starts.

She’s cut off by Allison grabbing her arm and almost lifting her off her feet, dragging them back towards her car. “Sorry but I forgot to turn off my phone and Scott heard and he says—he says he’s got it, he can see my dad,” Allison shouts back over her shoulder. “It’s you and him! My dad’s at your house, Gerard hated Scott’s guts, he—”

Melissa doesn’t need to hear anymore. She gets her feet under herself, and beats Allison to the car.

* * *

Beacon Hills is a small town, but for some reason it seems unbearably wide that night. Melissa breaks just about every traffic law there is and she still just can’t seem to go fast enough. And then, of all things, a damn fallen tree branch appears in the road.

She swerves and slams on the brakes, and just about gets away with a few dents in the bumper, but the branch is big enough that she has to stop the car. Allison makes a sobbing noise and Melissa looks over, but there aren’t any tears on the girl’s face; she’s just that frustrated. Which Melissa completely understands, though that alone isn’t going to get that branch out of the way.

Melissa starts to get out of the car and her phone goes off. She goes a step, figuring she’ll get the branch away first, but it rings again and something…her gut flinches and she’s just done with ignoring that. She’d been trying to be rational all week and she’s too worked up and she pulls out her phone and hits the ‘answer’ button.

 _“Mom, listen,”_ Scott says. 

She stops.

 _“Listen,”_ Scott says again. He’s moving, grunting with the effort of whatever he’s doing. _“Listen, I’m sorry, I know what you said, but I heard him, and—I had to go stop him first. But I’m okay and he’s okay, and…we’re on the back porch now, and I’m going to sit here with him till you get here. You’re coming over, right?”_

Melissa breathes out very slowly. “Chris is there?”

Allison had pounced on the branch and was dragging it, but at that she whirls around. Then hurries over, half-tripping over the top twigs as she goes.

 _“Yeah, I’ve got him.”_ Scott sucks in his breath in that awkward way he has whenever he’s about to admit to something he regrets. _“Mom, there weren’t any shots left in the bathroom, and anyway, I wasn’t sure they’d work fast enough so I…I kind of sneaked up on him and knocked him out. I didn’t want to, but—but he had a knife too and I didn’t want to get in a fight with him and I just figured that that’d be better.”_

“Did…what’s his pulse, did you take it?” Melissa says. She turns around towards the car, moving like a rusty robot, and then she shakes herself and gets back into gear. “Breathing?”

Scott rattles off pulse and breathing rates, rustling around. _“I didn’t hit him, I pinched his neck till he passed out,”_ he says. _“Got my coat under his head, that’s all supported…um, I wasn’t sure if I should try and get the detox kit but that’s all the way through the house…”_

“No. No, just monitor, we’ll be over,” Melissa says, climbing into the car. She tosses her phone to Allison, who clutches it in both shaking hands, and then squeezes the car past the branch.

It’s a tight fit and she gets more scratches on the car, but she’ll have to get it repaired anyway. Another couple minutes and she’s pulling back up to her house, with John’s SUV roaring in just seconds behind her.

Melissa half-notices that John’s not alone; a woman climbs out of the passenger side, dressed like a civilian but carrying a case with an official-type seal on it. But Melissa doesn’t have the time for more than a flip of the hand as she and Allison run around the side of the house. Her heart fillips as a dark figure straightens up on the porch, but then it turns and she sees her son’s relieved face.

“Hey, Mel, hang on, just—I’m sorry, but Braeden—” John gasps, coming around the corner.

The woman with him peels off and silently vaults the porch rail. Scott promptly steps back, staring at her, spreading his body out with his claws extended. Allison makes a choked noise, then spins so she’s got her taser trained on this Braeden as she backs over to the limp body stretched out behind Scott’s feet.

“No, it’s fine, it’s…it’s not just a curse, it’s a goddamn mold in the walls, she brought an antidote down from the CDC,” John says, stumbling up to put his hand on Melissa’s shoulder. “She’s got a shot for him.”

“Well, give it to me,” Melissa says. She feels momentarily bad about shaking him off, but then she gets up the porch steps and sees how badly both kids are trembling.

Melissa turns to face the other woman. Braeden’s eyeing them all with the same detached, faintly bemused air that John’s more mercenary ex-mil buddies have, but she at least doesn’t bother with a smart comment or anything like that. Just pulls a syringe from her bag and tosses it to Melissa, who aspirates it as she kneels down by Chris and pulls up his sleeve, then pushes the contents into the first vein she finds.

Chris doesn’t look any different—he’s just as slack and still as before—but Scott sniffs, cocks his head, and then heaves out a sigh of relief. And then he rocks a little, as Allison grabs onto him. He steadies himself, wrapping his arm around her, and then they sit down on the porch on Chris’ other side.

“What was he doing?” John says. He’s come up to stand on the steps behind Melissa.

Scott’s head comes up and he blinks owlishly, as if he somehow missed John. Then he bites his lip, head dipping and knee rising so he’s curling himself around Allison.

“I want to know, too,” Allison says quietly to him. “Don’t just—I need to know. If we’re going to help him—”

“He was over there,” Scott says, voice tight. He nods at the edge of the backyard, where a large oak tree is standing. “With a knife, and some candles and a book. Those are all still over—I didn’t grab them. I think he—I think he was trying to cast a spell. He cut himself and was using it to write on the tree.”

Which is when Melissa spots the fresh rag wrapped around one of Chris’ hands. It’s a little messy, but tight enough that when she checks it over, she decides to leave it in place till they can get Chris to the hospital. But not so tight it’ll cause gangrene, she notes, touching the pink tips of Chris’ fingers.

“I wasn’t going to go out, Mom. I was in the middle of just calling you, but then he was going to cut himself again, and he was aiming higher,” Scott adds after a moment.

John curses softly under his breath. The porch step creaks under his weight, and then he goes down into the grass and Melissa can hear him calling for an ambulance.

“I can look at the tree,” Braeden says.

To both John and Melissa, but John answers first, since Melissa is busy pressing her hand over her face. “Yeah, fine, thanks,” John says.

Then he looks at Melissa, but she just shrugs him off. Frankly, she doesn’t care what’s on the tree right now.

“It’s okay,” she tells her son. Then she looks at Allison too. “It’ll be okay. We got him in time, and now we just need to get everything checked out. It’ll be okay. We’ll stay here till the ambulance comes, but it’s…it’s okay, Scott. You did okay.”

* * *

Cursed mold. Hard to grow unless you’re well-versed in certain types of illegal magic, but once it’s got a foothold in a place, it’s damn near impossible to get rid of. Also, slow to leave the body, and its effects can surface long after the initial exposure. All the people who’d been near or in the motel the first time had gone through general curse-breaking measures, but just to be on the safe side, the CDC’s recommended shots for everyone.

Including Stiles, since his quasi-botanical profile actually makes him more vulnerable to mold. He’s so unused to having to do that sort of thing, and Derek and Peter are so patently concerned, that he ends up acting like it’s a trip to the zoo. Anyway, he manages to distract Scott and Allison while Chris is being treated, and Melissa is grateful for that, even if her nurse side rolls its eyes at Stiles’ antics.

Not that she has that much spare time. It turns out the FBI team leader had had the sense to forward a few preliminary samples to the CDC, who’d sent out a containment team as soon as they’d figured out what they had on their hands. And the team is very professional and well-prepared, and, rare for an intruding agency, not assholes to the locals, but they do need someone to show them the ins and outs of the hospital and for some reason management has nominated Melissa. She has experience liaising with federal entities, but at the end of the day she’s still a nurse, not a doctor, and some of the things the CDC needs are way above her pay grade.

By the time John finally finds her, a rather embarrassed physician in tow, Melissa’s just a few seconds from locking herself in a bathroom stall so she can pull her hair out in peace. “Sorry about that, I got stuck on a call with FBI headquarters,” he mutters, walking Melissa out of the labs.

“Blame game?” Melissa sighs.

“Actually, no, for once. Though it’s not really better—it got flagged as high-priority, rightly, because of Stiles, but then it got exaggerated or something, and now they’re all fighting to _not_ be the one who got the oldest Nemeton in California infected with sooty mold,” John says.

Melissa looks at him. “I thought that was a fungus.”

“It _is_ a fungus. And even if sooty mold was actually a mold, it’s not the same mold that…you know, I just got out of that argument.” John rubs at his temple, then sticks his elbow out to point them down another hall. “Honestly, you can’t win. If they aren’t taking it seriously because it’s just a tree, if they are serious about it because it is _the_ tree, none of them are going to bother actually learning any botany. Anyway, I told them if they’ve got Nemeton concerns, run it through me or Stiles, not you.”

They’re walking through the ICU and Melissa spots an FBI jacket in at least one room, but John’s pace hasn’t slowed and he’s looking straight ahead of them, not to either side. Which tells Melissa a few times, but…she doesn’t quite want to voice them. She tells herself she’s being a chicken and not asking doesn’t make things better or worse, it just means she doesn’t know, but…she presses her lips together.

“Stiles got his shot and I let him loose on some of the doctors, but I probably should get him out of their hair so they can actually start funneling in people for shots,” John adds after a second. “And then I need to figure out what to do with Braeden.”

“How did she end up here, anyway?” Melissa says. “I didn’t think you were doing interviews yet.”

“Yeah, I’m not, but she was working with the CDC on some other thing in the area, and her FBI buddy apparently asked her to stop by with the prelim results. I’m guessing he figured he’d surprise me with a meet and greet,” John says. He sighs again, and then slides his hand onto Melissa’s shoulder as they turn a last corner. “She didn’t seem to know he’d submitted her file to me, either, so it was…it was awkward even before he started hallucinating. Anyway—oh, Scott.”

Scott’s just around the bend, carrying a pair of water cups. “Hey, Mr. Stilinski,” he says, and then he shifts to Melissa. “Mom, are you okay? Are you going to be stuck here tonight? We were just—Allison’s going to run home for a bag of clothes, and I know I’m grounded, but—”

“You can drive her if she’s feeling shaky,” Melissa says, unable to help a smile.

“Oh. Okay, thank you,” Scott says. He smiles back, but just for a second, because Allison’s tiptoeing out of a nearby room and it immediately distracts him. He doesn’t completely turn his eyes from Melissa, but she can tell he’s listening for Allison instead. “So we could go get your bag too, if you want.”

“Yeah, and if you need anything else,” Allison says, coming up. She looks tired but not too fretful, and the skin under her eyes isn’t smudged with running make-up or pinked up from being scrubbed clean. “I’m…I’m really hungry, actually, and it’s weird but…I guess I should do something about that, if I’m going to be in shape to help Dad in the morning. We could get you some food too.”

She steps right up to Scott as she talks, her hand tucking into Scott’s arm. That’s something Allison normally does all the time, but Scott goes still and then he ducks his head, just hiding a relieved, hesitant smile. Then he turns back to her and presses a kiss to the side of her head as she sags against him. “Stiles wants fries, says vaccines make the tree demand saturated fats, so we can just make a run to that diner, Mom,” he says.

“Does he,” John says dryly. “Funny, when I got my flu shot he insisted that the tree wanted us to buy extra cold-pressed juice.”

Scott blinks rapidly, setting the water cups down on a nearby cart. “Um. Well. I think the place has…maybe apple juice, or something…”

“Never mind, Scott, just, where is my kid?” John mutters, shaking his head, and then he turns around as somewhere behind them, raised voices arguing about molds versus fungus start to drift in. “Right. Mel, I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Oh, I forgot…I need to get the car keys from Dad, sorry,” Allison says, almost at the same time. She gives Scott’s arm a squeeze, then ducks back into the room.

He looks after her, smiling and rubbing at the back of his head, and then he catches Melissa watching and blushes. “You two work things out?” Melissa says.

“We had…yeah, we talked about a couple things,” Scott says. He puts his hand down, then digs both hands into his pockets. “We had to wait while Chris was—they were hooking him up to the detox stuff, and I figured I’d better say sorry for knocking him out, and Allison told me I was an even bigger idiot, and I was telling her just because she was scared for him doesn’t mean she…anyway, I’m sure you don’t want to hear all the details, but I think we’re good now.”

“Good,” Melissa says, and she means it. She thinks the two of them are good for each other, and she likes Allison personally, and…just because she fell in love too young doesn’t mean her son’s going to make her mistake. “Good. I’m glad.”

Scott’s smile widens, and then it suddenly shrinks away and he hunches up. “Um, so, Mom…I’m sorry I ran out again,” he says. “I just—I really didn’t see any other way.”

“It’s all right, baby.” Melissa pauses, and then reaches up and takes him by the shoulders. He looks a little surprised and she makes sure he sees that she’s not lying, or just too tired to fight, or anything but genuinely proud of him. “It is. Because you were smart this time, Scott. You didn’t just run in there and hope that showing up would do it—what you did, you really did make sure nobody got more hurt than they had to. And you called for help when you needed it, and that’s the important part. That’s what upset me so much last time. In real life, you have to work as a team, and you did that tonight.”

“Thank you, Mom,” Scott says. He’s smiling again, his lovely startled smile, as if he can’t believe how lucky he is. “Thanks, I really…I hate letting you down.”

“Oh, baby, you can’t ever really do that,” Melissa says, giving into the urge to hug him. “I’m your mother. I love you, and I’ll always believe in you. When you screw up, I want you to do better because I always think you’re capable of it.”

Scott’s hand crushes into her back and he takes a deep, sharp breath. His grip’s just short of painful, but just for a second, and then he immediately lightens up, making a low burring noise, the kind of apology werewolf toddlers make—he’s always careful of his strength around her and this is about as much as he ever slips up. She laughs and scruffs his hair, and his burr changes to a full-on purr as he steps back.

Allison’s just come out of the room again. She looks a little hesitant as she moves back up to Scott’s side, and when her eyes drop from Melissa’s face, that’s when Melissa realizes she’s what’s making Allison nervous. 

“So…do you have to go off now?” Allison says, still looking at Melissa’s shoulder. She takes a deep breath and then looks up. “I understand if you’re busy, it’s just…Dad’s awake now, and I have to—”

“No, I think I’m done for now. I’ll keep him company,” Melissa says. She sounds steady. It’s surprising, considering how her insides seem to be unknotting at an almost sickening pace.

“Oh, good, thank you so much,” Allison says in a rush. She grabs at Scott’s arm again, catching her breath, and then she reaches out and gives Melissa a quick, impulsive, but very tight hug. It’s even tighter than Scott’s hug a second ago. “He’s really down, just…tell him to stop it, please?”

Melissa winces, then catches Scott’s eye over Allison’s shoulder. “I’ll be here,” she says after a moment. “I’ll talk to him.”

She untangles Allison from her, and then watches the two of them walk off together. Her arms come up around herself and she rubs her hands over her ribs, a little chilly, and then—pauses, seeing the water cups Scott left. Then she shakes her head. She picks them up and she goes into the room.

“Hey,” Chris says, heaving the word out like a lead weight.

He’s not too badly off. There’s an IV in his arm and a couple electrodes taped to his chest, but the wires are trailing out over a rumpled, half-buttoned shirt, not a hospital gown. Melissa knows that’s probably just because the hospital is too busy to do the full change-over, but it makes Chris look less like…well, like a patient, somebody who’ll have to be checked in for a while. More like somebody who just stopped in for a check-up.

And that’s just trying to make herself feel better, which is completely selfish, Melissa thinks sharply. “Hey,” she says, coming to the bedrail. She abandons the water to the bedside tray, and then leans over to touch his knee. “How are you feeling?”

Chris winces, his head turning away from her. Melissa’s hand itches to dart out and make it turn back, but she makes herself keep all ten fingers on the rail. She’s a nurse, she’s handled all kinds of people over the years, and she knows when ordering around will help, and when it’ll hurt more than any trouble it saves.

“Your house,” Chris says after an endless, incredibly tense few seconds. “I wasn’t—the idea wasn’t to hurt you or Scott. It was—I just—I left you wide-open when Gerard was running around town, and we just got lucky he didn’t go after you to try and get at Allison, and I just—that was what I was thinking.”

“What were…” she has to stop and breathe slowly, to keep her voice steady “…what were you trying to do?”

He winces again, and then reaches up to his face, only to get his hand tangled in the wires. Melissa puts out her hand before she can stop herself and grabs his wrist; Chris jerks around to stare at her, his eyes wide, the grey of them swallowing pinprick pupils. He sucks in his breath, but his hand is limp as a rag as, after a moment, Melissa just goes ahead and weaves it out from under the wires.

“Chris,” she starts, and then she feels him try to pull his hand away. She doesn’t let him, and makes her voice firmer, too. “Chris, listen, it wasn’t you. There’s a whole team of highly-trained FBI agents in the hospital tonight because of that motel, and they all acted like—they all lost it.”

“Yeah, I heard,” he says tightly.

“Yeah, well, it was really that bad,” John suddenly breaks in from the doorway. He ducks his head when Melissa shoots him a glower, and just stays where he is, arms folded over his chest, shoulder propped against the jamb. “Ramirez broke into the supply closet, tried to pour industrial-grade acid over his hands to clean off blood from some case a couple years ago.”

Chris pushes himself a little up against the pillow, his lips pressed into a thin line, but the anger goes as quickly as it came and his head drops as he deflates. “I know I was hallucinating, all right?” he says to the sheet pulled over his lap. “I know it was just some bizarre black magic mold. The doctors went over that with me. It’s just…look, you should know what I was trying to do. I was…I was…”

And then he falls silent. His hands twist together, then pull apart, and then he levers his chin up as if there’s an invisible stick under it. The expression on his face—it’s just all kinds of wounded pride, and even deeper injuries under that, and then on top there’s a flicker of a plea that just makes Melissa’s chest clench. 

“He got about three sigils into a shadow ward,” John finally says. His voice is softer, but he’s still being rougher than Melissa cares for, even if Chris’ shoulders sag in relief before she can turn around for another glare. “Those things where if somebody tries to attack your place, it’ll bounce back on his, and Chris, just…you and Allison are still living in your—”

“I _know_ ,” Chris says, sharp to the point of vicious. His chin jerks up and he looks at them as if he’s ready to crawl up the wall to get away if they come any closer, and then he sags again. “I know, John, how do you…it’s a pretty obvious sign I really was under some goddamn influence, forgetting about my daughter. I just—God, I’m sorry.”

Melissa wants to touch him, but she’s not sure if he’ll be fine with that yet, so she just pulls at her hair. “I’ll accept that if you need it, but I don’t need it,” she mutters. “Chris, I know there’s a lot tangled up for you here, but—”

“It’s not that my damned father is years dead and still tripping everything up, every time I—look, it’s not that they could’ve found it sooner if he’d been on the ball,” Chris says abruptly. He fidgets with the sheet, then glances at John. “Don’t talk about the state of mold detection tests in the damn seventies and eighties. Allison tried that, pretty sure she had Stiles texting her lines to give me.”

John muffles a groan into his hand. Then he pulls himself fully into the room, pulling shut the door behind him, and takes up a spot leaning against the wall across from the bed. “Okay, well, then…”

Chris looks between them and the movement’s wild enough that Melissa straightens up. But then he just shakes his head, putting one hand up to his brow. “It’s not even that you two just won’t—that you just—you still just keep trying with me, even though I’m—it’s just. It’s just…goddamn it, I’m _not_ the shitshow I was before you took up with me. I’m not. I’m better, and even with all my problems I can see that, and then something like this happens and I know it happened to other people too but they’re going to get over it just fine.”

Melissa just bites back her comment, and then she glances at John; he wants to disagree too, but he’s got his lips pressed together.

“Well, maybe not fine, but they’ll get over it faster than me, I’m pretty sure of that, because that’s how people without my bullshit family handle things,” Chris snaps. He rocks back against the pillow, then rubs his hand over his forehead again. “It’s just, damn it, I want to stay better. I want to. I don’t want to go backward. But I—I—look, Melissa, what you said to Scott, I heard it and—and—God, all these years I’ve just been telling myself, just get Allison raised and on her own and everything will be fine. And she’ll be fine. She really will. I don’t know how I did it, but she’ll be fine. But—but I’m not, and I just—I can’t do this. I can’t do this by myself. I’m sorry, I can’t, I just—I can’t.”

“Chris,” John says, alarmed.

Melissa’s already hiking herself up over the rail. She slows as Chris moves, but after that first flinch, he holds still, staring at her with an unnerving intensity. She has to not look at him to keep going, to be honest, but she gets her legs over the damn rail, and then seats her ass on the bed and holds her arms out.

For a second she thinks Chris won’t, and then…he crumples into her, so fast that she can’t keep all the wires clear. One of the electrodes must shift because the machine beeps loudly; Melissa stifles a curse, batting at the wires, and then just concentrates on keeping the IV line un-kinked. Behind her she hears John walk over and the beeping stops, and then John walks back and opens the door and says something to somebody that she doesn’t really hear over the harsh, uneven sound of Chris breathing into her breast.

Chris just lets her hold him for a few seconds. Then his head moves, but just to get up onto her shoulder. His hand brushes her hip before twisting up into her blouse. “God, I’m sorry,” he says raggedly.

“I was trying not to say anything, but if you’re going to keep saying that when it’s not your fault, and you’re not doing anything wrong,” Melissa starts. Then she drops it and just rubs the back of his neck till his breathing steadies a little. “Listen, if you—”

“Please,” Chris says.

She stops again. She looks at his head, and then up as something rattles: the rail, which John is unlatching. He hooks an arm under Melissa’s legs, which are still hanging over it, and then he lowers both them and the rail so he can lean up on the other side of Chris.

“You’re not doing it by yourself, all right? We’re gonna help,” he says, putting his hand on Chris’ back. “If…if you’re asking—”

“Yeah. Yeah, I am. I just…I should’ve before, but I…I don’t know, I guess I’m not that far off the rest of my family,” Chris mumbles. His fingers squeeze Melissa’s blouse, pulling it tight over her back, and then loosen and drop off. He gropes a bit, then turns his hand around so that he can grab at John’s thigh. “Allison…I don’t know how much this had to do with things, but she told me this week she wants to try living in a dorm her first year. And it’s already bad enough when she’s over at your place and it’s just me in the house and I just don’t know what I’ll do when it’s like that all the time.”

“It doesn’t have to be like that all the time,” Melissa says.

Chris snorts. It’s too nervy, the way it rises at the end. “I can’t just keep going over to your places.”

“Well, why not? Scott will have to be in a dorm if he gets a scholarship, I’ll have room,” Melissa says.

She’s not thinking when she says it. She does a second later, because John is giving her an odd look, and then Chris finally raises his head and the way _he_ looks at her—it’s like she’s just waved a winning ticket to the lottery in front of him, but he knows it’s her ticket, not his.

“You have your own life,” Chris says. “I need—I want help with this, but it’s not—we don’t have to just walk over your—”

“You don’t walk over anything, Chris. You don’t even bring your bag in, you just keep it in your car. I pulled three of John’s shirts out of my laundry today and I don’t think I’ve ever found so much as a used piece of floss from you,” Melissa says, maybe a little tartly. And maybe John’s giving her even more of an odd look now. She doesn’t care.

She didn’t want to get that serious with Chris before, it’s true. Didn’t want to uproot her life just when she’d finally gotten it in an order that she didn’t just have to put up with, but that she liked. But…she looks at him now, and even without the emergency, she thinks of him as part of that order. She wants him as part of it. Her life’s changed, she thinks, and…and if he can find the guts to ask, then so can she.

“It’s not just so you can have a minder,” she says. “If that’s what you think you need, Chris, honestly, we should be talking to the psychologists. It’s so…if you want to keep going with this, with us, then move into my house. You scared the hell out of us tonight, and I don’t just want to not lose you. I love you, and I want you close because I want all the people I love close.”

Chris stares at her. And stares at her. And just keeps staring at her, to the point that Melissa gets self-conscious and then flustered because it’s stupid to think about how she looks right now, given what’s happened with Chris. And then it’s just downright unnerving, and she’s about to shake him when he suddenly lurches forward.

He’s clearly not trying to kiss her. He might be trying to headbutt her, from the angle, but that doesn’t make sense—and then he ducks and twists his head at the last second, and gets it tucked tight into the crook of her neck. His shoulders are shuddering violently, pulling down over and over, and she has her hand pulled halfway around his stretched-out throat when her brain catches up with her instincts.

Melissa looks up at John, who’s now grinning at her, the asshole. She makes a face at him, and then, very deliberately, moves her hand the rest of the way, from the back of Chris’ neck to the side. She uses it to push his face harder into her throat, then dips—Chris lets out a shaky, thin whimper—to press her mouth against the other side of his neck.

Chris whines, then coughs roughly. “Thank you,” he says, low, fervent. “Thank you. Yes—yes, I want to—thank you.”

She breathes in a little sharply. If he’d said he loved her back—that doesn’t feel like Chris, not right in this moment. But he’s telling her the same thing, and she has to admit, it settles something in her she hadn’t quite realized was nervous to hear it.

“Well, good, then that’s settled,” John says. He’s still just got his hand on Chris’ back but he doesn’t look jealous or left out or anything like that. Maybe a little nervous, but that goes away when Chris digs out of Melissa’s neck and crooks around, looking like he’s going to start apologizing again. A mixture of exasperation and worry crosses John’s face, and then he sighs and reaches over to run his hand over Chris’ head, stopping that apology. “For the record, I’m open too, but Derek and Peter do take up a lot of air. Still, if you want to even it out, I guess you could leave some socks with me.”

“You are such a jerk sometimes,” Melissa says, narrowing her eyes at him.

Chris snorts. Then he drops his head to press his hand against the side of his face, but he’s still got an uptilt to his mouth. “I refill your snack drawer in the office, does that not count?”

John makes a face, while Melissa laughs and hugs Chris to her. Then he bites off half a swear as his phone buzzes. He doesn’t take it out, but he puts his hand to the pocket holding it, and then he sighs and he leans over to press his forehead against Chris’ temple for a second. “Look, whenever you figure out what you’d like to ask from me, I’m around,” he says. “And I’ll be around. Like Mel says, it’s not about fitting you around our lives, Chris, it’s fitting you in them.”

“Yeah. Yeah, and I…you have no idea how much I value that,” Chris says quietly. 

His eyes flick over John, and then he shifts forward as John starts to slide off the bed. Just a little, but it’s enough to stop John. Then Chris pushes himself up. Puts his hand on John’s arm, then his chest, as he tips his head and John obliges him with a short but very firm kiss; John tucks the IV line out of the way, then curls his hand around the side of Chris’ throat, stroking his thumb up under Chris’ jaw.

“I gotta go deal with…things I wish I didn’t,” John says, backing off. “You know, she’s here, maybe I should just get the damn interview over with…though then that means I’ve probably got to at least call Parrish, to keep it all fair.”

“Interview?” Chris asks, tensing slightly.

“Yeah, the designated hunter slot, we’re looking at converting it to another role. We’re pretty covered for general needs between the Hales and the tree and the rest of us, so I’m not sure what another hunter would bring, actually,” John says. He’s being casual, on purpose, and Melissa almost is angry with him before she suddenly catches on.

She looks over at Chris, and he’s just easing out of his stiff pose, curious enough that he’s obviously not thinking of it as yet another failure that can be traced back to his family. Neither she nor John have mentioned the slot around Chris since he told them not to wait for him to get his full license back, but even so, she thinks, the empty position must have been a constant reminder to Chris. And filling it with another hunter wouldn’t have helped at all with that, she sees now.

Melissa isn’t sure that John had all of that in mind before—he’s good but he’s not a mindreader, and Chris is a hard read on the best of days—but he’s definitely getting all the nuances now. “What made sense for the office back in the day just might not do it anymore,” John adds, looking at Chris. “Ecosystems change, we have to deal with that. It’s just part of the job.”

“What kind of person are you looking for now?” Chris asks. He’s got just a little wryness in his tone, enough to let them know he’s not totally in the dark about what they’re doing, but mostly he’s…straightening up, looking engaged. Getting back on his feet, for all that he’s still in bed.

“Yeah, well, that’s the part I haven’t figured out yet,” John sighs. “Not that I haven’t tried, but I can’t find the time. Seems like we’ve gotten a reputation and everybody knows some oddball or problem child they want to send our way.”

“Well, you _still_ let Stiles write your reports,” Melissa points out.

John rolls her eyes at her, then finally pulls out his phone. He grimaces at whatever he sees, takes a half-step towards the door, and then backtracks so he can give her a quick peck on the cheek. “Look, I gotta step out again, make sure Stiles actually _went home_ like he was supposed to, but do you want me to get anything?”

“Scott and Allison are already on that,” Melissa says. She starts shifting back towards the head of the bed, ducking under Chris’ IV, and when he looks at her, she just smiles at him. Then curls her hand under his elbow and gives him a light tug towards her. “Though if you pass anywhere near the linen closet—”

“Yeah, I’ll grab you the good blankets,” John says. He walks out, his eyes glued to his phone.

“You’re staying?” Chris says.

Melissa reaches back and pulls out the pillow, and fluffs it up as best she can. She returns it, and then leaves her arm around Chris’ waist. “My backyard is an investigation scene, I’m sure there’s already somebody taping off my driveway,” she says. “If you don’t mind sharing?”

Chris lets out a short, incredulous laugh. He still looks like he’s waiting for it to all collapse on him; he’s holding himself in that edgy, brace-position way. But after a moment, he lifts his hand and he puts it on her thigh.

“No,” he says. “Stay.”

She smiles at him, and then she leans back against the pillow, getting as comfortable as she can. He hesitates, then works himself down next to her, resting his head against her shoulder as she figures out the best position is half-curled around him. His lips brush the side of her jaw, and he lets out a little, lingering sigh that just trails into a purr at the very end, and she finally, finally, feels like she can stop worrying for a while.

* * *

“You know, people are going to say you’re giving in after all,” Peter says. 

He’s walking Melissa out to her car after their weekly poker game. She’d figured Peter had something coming, what with not saying a single word about the fall-out from the motel, even when the CDC team was all that the other people at the table could talk about. But she’s surprised he’s taking that angle. 

Surprised and annoyed, and it shows because he lifts both hands. “Let me finish,” he says. “I was going to add, they said the same thing when Talia remarried. And when she married Richard in the first place, for that matter. Never mind that she and he had already had Laura and Derek was on the way at that point—they still said she was changing her mind about being an alpha.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” Melissa says, stopping to dig in her purse. She just feels her keys, but then they slip away on her, and her phone’s somehow wedged itself in the way. She makes an annoyed noise and finally just pulls her phone out to get behind it. “And you usually have an allergy to ridiculous. I thought, at least.”

“And you’re just like my sister when I brought it up, assuming I’m siding with something just because I’m bringing the news,” Peter sighs, shaking his head. “Is it my face? Because I always thought I had a very enlightened set of features.”

She looks up at him, then snorts and prods his arm with her phone. He doesn’t let that—ridiculous—sober expression of his flicker, but he does reach over to cup his hand under her purse, so she can dig deeper into it.

“Yeah, I know, and it’ll be just the same as when people were saying that I was crazy for going it alone in the first place, and I was just going to end up warping Scott into one of those rogue sociopaths you see in the movies,” Melissa mutters. She finally hooks her finger through the keyring, then draws it out with a satisfied huff. “At least he’ll be off at college this time, and won’t have to deal with it.”

“Talia and Richard actually argued quite a bit about that,” Peter says. He takes his hand away and clasps his wrists behind his back, then resumes pacing her across the parking lot. “The children. With what she and I had to deal with when we were growing up, she didn’t want to get them involved too early in the politics. Richard kept pointing out it’s not just politics, it’s the playground taunts, and kids are going to fight whatever we do, so we might as well teach them to meet things head-on.”

Melissa glances at him. Peter rarely talks about Richard, though the two of them had actually been close, from everything that Melissa’s heard. Talia had once let slip that she and Richard had had a brief separation between Laura and Derek, and it’d been Peter who’d brought them together again. “I can’t imagine Derek or Laura not jumping in.”

“Well, no, and Laura barged her way in enough times, she more or less picked up the gist of it, and then passed it down to Derek and Cora.” Peter grins at the distant treeline, clearly proud. “Making her own plans, very Hale of her. Personally, I went back and forth. No point in hiding the obvious, but they were children. You don’t want amateurs messing up your plans either.”

“And not everyone’s like Stiles, born with a ten-point plan for outmaneuvering the opposition in his head,” Melissa says.

Peter hums, but then he looks at her. “So he’s always been like that?”

“He’s…you know, he was always finding the holes in the fence, no matter how old he was. But when he was younger, he wasn’t…he did it just because he was curious, not because he was really trying to get involved, change things,” Melissa says after a moment. “It’s not like John and Claudia threw him in right away. They tried to hold back, it’s just…he’d see what they had to deal with, and it’s hard for children to see their parents get hurt, and not do anything about it.”

“True. Scott’s never been too shy about shutting down any comments about you,” Peter says. He’s deliberately not looking at her, pretending to watch a bird flying by, and she almost hits him again, just to stir him out of that annoyingly fake thoughtful voice of his. “He’s quite willing to let anything about him go, but I’ve seen him roll weres twice his weight over you.”

“When was this?” Melissa says, frowning. “I don’t remember—did this happen at one of the monthly hunts? How come I never—”

“Oops,” Peter says, not ashamed the least little bit. “I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. Though if it had ever been something that carried over outside of the hunt, I’m sure Talia would have mentioned it.”

Melissa jerks pointedly at her purse strap and Peter mock-cringes from her. “And I was just thinking that Scott will be all right,” she mutters.

“He is all right. He’s a very levelheaded young man ninety-eight percent of the time, which, compared to the vast number of hotheads we’ve hosted over the years, is doing very well,” Peter points out. “And it really doesn’t matter whether he’s away or not, you know, werewolves will always want to defend pack. That’s just how we are.”

“I know that. I know, I just—want him to worry about his own life,” Melissa says. “I’ve been dealing with the hypocrites and idiots of the world all my life, I can handle them.”

“Of course you can. Just like my sister could have taken every single challenge or slight to her alpha status herself, if she felt like it,” Peter says soothingly. “And worn herself to the bone.”

They’re at Melissa’s car now. Peter steps back and Melissa puts her hand on the door, then sighs and turns to him. “So what’s the lesson you’re trying to give me, Peter? That I need to learn to let Scott go once in a while?”

“Not a lesson, Melissa. Just an observation or two,” Peter says, still with that damned mild smile of his. “Talia did end up sitting the children down and talking to them about being a female alpha and why it was perfectly fine that Richard was a beta, and on the whole I think they’ve taken it to heart, even if she still has a little trouble herself. That’s the trouble with being _sui generis_ , after all—nobody’s there to give you the talk. Good game, I’m looking forward to seeing you win everything back next week.”

“Oh…if I don’t get it back sooner, bailing your alpha out of trouble,” Melissa says, and she does smack his arm as she gets behind the wheel. “You tell Stiles that I know he’s sniffing around the CDC people, and he needs to just let them do their jobs. If one test result gets messed up, I swear—”

Peter at least has the grace to look embarrassed at that. “We’re wrapping up an arbitration and after tomorrow I’ll have more free time, so that should do it. Good night, Melissa.”

“’night, Peter,” Melissa says.

A couple minutes later, she’s frowning at the car in her driveway. Then she remembers Chris and Allison are supposed to be over. Allison and Scott both had been almost frighteningly happy to hear about Chris moving in, to the point that they’d—well, to be honest, Melissa had let them bulldoze her and Chris a bit. She’d meant once the kids had started college, and as far as she can tell, Chris had thought so too, but Allison had immediately suggested alternate weekends to “get used to it” and before Melissa had really been able to process it, she had a schedule drawn up and everything.

Melissa had started feeling nervous then, and those flutters are back in her stomach now as she pulls into the garage. She and Scott have been on their own for a long time, and it can be hard to change a routine, no matter how you feel about it.

But…she walks in, and she can hear their kids chatting on the back porch—Lydia and Isaac are over too and she catches snippets about a group graduation party—and she thinks that’s not too bad. Scott’s coat is still on the hook, and he’s left his textbook on the kitchen table as usual. The pen on top with the arrow charm hanging off the end is new, but it’s a pen. Not going to shatter the world, or anything like that.

She does frown, because something’s missing, and then she hears a couple sounds from the downstairs bathroom. Which is where she finds a slightly chagrined Chris, who’s sitting on the floor in front of the open sink cabinet with boxes of medical supplies that should be in the cabinet scattered around him instead. He’s got something in his hand that he almost tries to hide, and then he sighs and lets her see that it’s a knife.

“I…keep one of these in all the bathrooms at home,” he mutters. “Because the toilet’s a common ambush point, but…I guess you know that. Since you’ve got a taser taped back here.”

“We get upgrades every year on the Service’s dime, and I just didn’t want to throw away the old ones when they were still good,” Melissa says, a little embarrassed herself. She does sometimes wonder whether a medical professional really should have so many damn weapons lying around—but then again, they’ve all gotten used at least once. “It’s kind of hard to take a military-grade taser to the recycling center.”

Chris snorts, the corners of his mouth tilting up as he looks at her. Then he ducks his head a little fast, putting the knife back in a case he’s got for it. “I can just take this—”

“You don’t need that much room, I can…right, this can go up here,” Melissa says, picking up a box of spare syringes. She grabs the edge of the sink and straightens up to put it into the over-the-sink cabinet.

“Melissa,” Chris says, sounding a little shaky. When she looks down, he’s swallowing hard, and then he puts his hand on her knee like he needs the support, even still sitting on the floor. “I…I kind of fuc—I didn’t…I love you too, you and John, and I should’ve said—anyway, I just want you to know, I know what this means, and I’m—I’m going to do my best to live up to it.”

“Chris,” Melissa says, trying not to sigh. Because she’s not exasperated with him, she’s really not. She just…she puts her hand down to touch his face and he grabs it, and then pulls it so that her knuckles are pressing into his cheek.

She breathes in, then out. Turns her hand so her fingers are cupping it, and then tugs at him till he scoots forward, and his head is leaning against her thigh. His thumb rubs into the hollow of her palm, then slides out as she runs her fingers down onto the side of his throat.

“Just put the toilet roll over, that’s all I ask,” she finally says. He looks up at her, puzzled, and she can’t help a giggle. “John’s an under man and it drives me insane, and…it’s just steps like that, all right? And we’ll just see how it goes.”

He’s a little disbelieving but she keeps stroking his neck and he slowly relaxes, and even manages a half-smile. “I think I can do that much,” he says. 

He puts his hand up to curl loosely over her wrist, so the weight drags her fingers under his shirt-collar, and then he shifts forward. Working out a cramp, something like that, but the way his breath blows over her, it gets warm over her crotch and she can’t help…and their kids are on the porch, God, sometimes she really is as shameless as—as—Melissa remembers what Peter was saying. “You ever hear the words _sui generis_?”

“Yeah, it’s Latin, means ‘unique,’ first of its kind, that sort of thing,” Chris says. “Something the matter?”

“Peter just showing off, nothing,” Melissa says after a second. She hitches her hip against the sink, putting down that box of syringes, and teases her fingertips along Chris’ collarbone, watching his pupils slowly dilate. He’s starting to flush a little too, but his other hand slips down and wraps around her ankle, and then he nudges his chin into her thigh. Melissa sucks in her breath, then deliberately twists her fingers in his collar and pulls him flush against her legs. “Just so you know, I didn’t offer just so we can jump into a closet that much faster.”

Chris hits the door with his foot when he moves, almost shutting it. He nestles his head into the vee of her crotch, and then pushes his foot out again, closing the door completely. “Yeah, I know. But…this isn’t a closet, anyway.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m the one who says that,” Melissa says, as Chris’ hand creeps up her leg. She bites her lip, rubbing her thumb back and forth along his jawline, and then she bites back a gasp as he doesn’t even wait for his hand to get up there, just nuzzles in along the seam of her pants till she can feel her underwear start to stick. “Well, fine, since it’s a _bathroom_ and that’s so much better…”

He hums like he’s listening, but then he gets the front of her scrubs down with his _teeth_ , damn him, and he might whine when she tugs at his neck but he’s certainly not letting that put him off licking at her. And—and it’s okay that way. 

It’s more than okay. It’s perfect, she thinks, digging her fingers into his shoulders. Tired after a long day, coming home to a totally reshaped life right when she got comfortable with things, and it’s perfect. She might not know exactly how they’re going to do this, but…she can just let that go for a few minutes, she figures. They’ll pick it up later.

**Author's Note:**

> Scott's not doing a Vulcan Death Grip, he's referring to pinching shut the carotid artery, which feeds blood to the brain. Please don't actually try this technique, it can cause brain damage and death (although the quick blow to the head that fiction loves so much also can easily cause way more health problems than just temporary unconsciousness, not that the side-effects are discussed often). 
> 
> Sooty mold is, in fact, actually a fungus, and is a real tree disease.
> 
> Before anyone gets massively excited, I haven't actually decided who's going to fill that slot. Parrish and Braeden seem to have fitting backstories (also, omg, TW cribs a ton from _Buffy/Angel_ but I think somebody over there is a _Justified_ fan too), but...I haven't watched the show up to when they really show up, and to be honest, I don't want to. Just getting through the end of the Alpha Pack arc tested my patience and dregs of liking for TW to the point that I'm afraid if I watch more, I'll hate it so much I'll swear off it completely. But it's hard to characterize people properly without seeing the source material.


End file.
